by David Daniel
I didn’t like it. As an explanation it worked in a Poe story better than in reality. A killer’s instincts, like most everyone else’s, were toward self-preservation.
So why not just leave the body in the trailer until he had a chance to dispose of it farther away, where it wouldn’t so clearly be tied to him? Sonders had said the people here didn’t go into each other’s quarters uninvited, which made it unlikely that Pepper would have feared accidental discovery. Still it made no sense … unless someone else had killed Flora Nuñez and brought the body there, wanting to make it seem as though Pepper had done it. But how? And who?
Go ahead, Rasmussen, keep asking questions. That’s your job.
I drove along the boulevard to Bedford Avenue, turned right, and took the next right, which put me on a course behind where the fairgrounds and the woods were. There were houses in there, and a city playground. A group of Southeast Asian kids were shooting hoops. None of them would be able to dunk the ball from a stepladder, but they had a good fast game going. I went past until I found a turnout and drew in and got out.
The adjoining area was overgrown with bushes and small trees. Several old telephone poles had been laid down to keep motor vehicles off the paths. Judging by the litter of empty malt liquor bottles, cigarette butts, and nasal inhalers, the place was a hangout for youths. There was a crude fire ring, fashioned from blackened stones. I kicked a toe through the nuggets of burnt wood. In movies there is often a moment when someone finds a tiny clue and gets a flash of insight that makes everything else snap into place. I only got ashes on my shoe.
I wandered the rest of the way into the woods, another thirty feet or so, until I came to the back edge of the meadow behind where the carnival was set up about fifty yards away I stood concealed in shade, hearing the errant buzz of insects around me, smelling the fragrance of Concord grapes ripening somewhere nearby, watching a hatch of flying insects twirling manic figure eights in the quiet air, thinking. If the dead woman had not been taken from Pepper’s trailer, suppose someone had driven her in here and transported her through the woods to the meadow? This would still have meant carrying the body though the distance was shorter by half, and the cover much better. As a theory, it had possibilities, but it didn’t provide me with any knowledge. As I reached my car, I saw three boys moving along a branching path. They looked to be nine or ten, two of them carrying air rifles. I called to them, and they saw me and stopped.
“Hi,” I said amiably. “I’m a detective.” More as a bit of actor’s business than anything else, I showed them my license. It bought some attention.
“We didn’t do nothing bad,” the taller of the two riflemen said at once.
“No, I know that.”
“These are only just BB guns.”
“I’m only just looking around. Maybe you can help me.”
Shrugs. “Okay … sure.”
“Do you kids play here a lot?”
“Sometimes. After school and stuff.”
“Do cars ever come in here?”
“Sometimes, yeah. There’s a gap between the logs.”
“Yeah, big kids drink in here sometimes,” the second rifleman said.
“Have you seen any cars in here the last few days?”
“No. Only just a police car. ’Cause of what happened at the carnival, I bet.”
Cote had the bases covered; I had to give him that.
“I seen one other car.”
We all turned to the smallest of the boys, who had spoken.
“A green one,” he said. “Small.”
“Do you remember what kind?”
“Mmm … Wait. TV”
“You’ve seen it advertised on TV?””
“No, it is a TV” His friends looked at him as if he were joking. “I mean the same brand, only I can’t remember it.”
“Yeah, right, Sully. Car and TV”
“A Mitsubishi?” I said.
“That’s it. I seen it here on … Sunday. Around suppertime.”
Suppertime, Sully guessed, was around six or maybe seven. He didn’t know much more, but I was interested in what he’d given me. I thanked them. “What are you hunting for?” I asked.
“Nothin’ really, we’re only just pretendin’.”
“You didn’t happen to shoot at a dog, did you?”
They exchanged a nervous glance, then chorused, “No.”
I nodded. “Okay, just be careful.”
They raised their hands, as though swearing to it.
For the record, when I got to my office, I checked with a friend at the registry. Flora Nuñez drove a dark green Mitsubishi.
21
I waited until near dark, which was coming sooner each day—7:40 by the clock on my dashboard—and drove over to the Lower Highlands again. Like most cities, Lowell was a collection of neighborhoods, and “lower” was literal, suggestive of a district where downhill was the directional flow of most things, from wealth to municipal services and, too often, to trouble. I’d dug up a telephone number for the property owner, a Boston attorney, and had asked her if it would be possible to have a look at an apartment recently occupied by Flora Nuñez. I told her I was working for a lawyer, thinking she might be sympathetic. She cut me short. “Let me put it to you this way. No.” I was left to supply my own reasons. Possibly she was hypersensitive to litigation and wanted to avoid even the remotest possibility that the fact that her tenant had been a crime victim might come back to haunt her. Maybe she just didn’t want the address to become notorious, a stop on the Mill City Gore Tour: “Y’see that apartment up there? That was where …” She probably just didn’t want to return the security deposit.
I parked on Westford near Dover Square and sat in the car. The block was an amalgam of multiunit apartment houses and small shops. Branch Street ran down toward Little Phnom Penh, a half mile away, and lighted billboards saturated area traffic with ads for cable TV shows, cheap liquor, and the names of personal injury lawyers. As I’d hoped, there was little activity on the street. The only place open was a quick mart-liquor store combo. Streetlamps mounted on every third or fourth telephone pole cast just enough light to read a scratch ticket by.
I locked the Cougar and walked briskly down the block, like a man on a mission, which I was. I reconned the block and circled around, and when I came back along the original stretch, I was moving more slowly and alertly. I went up to the building where Flora Nuñez had lived.
NO TRESPASSING, warned a sign on one corner of the house. No one had taken off the asbestos siding in favor of vinyl, and the trim had not been painted since they took the lead out of paint. I suppose just being there constituted a health hazard, but I had no plan to make the stay a lengthy one. I didn’t envision a security door, either, and wasn’t disappointed. In the foyer, a strip of Astroturf that had been worn to the nub scratched at the soles of my shoes. If the single weak bulb in the ceiling fixture threw twenty watts, I was Tom Edison. I used a small flashlight on the names below the mailboxes. They were the names you’d expect in a melting pot. Some aspirant for school committee trolling for votes had delivered a hopeful stack of campaign fliers delineating her position on key educational issues, but no one had bothered to take off the elastic band. In that precinct I think some of the voting machines were still steam powered. F. NUÑEZ was the name on mailbox number five.
The stairwell smelled of roach spray and last Friday’s fish, even three flights up, at the end of a short hallway I knocked softly, more for form than from expectation, and waited, listening for sounds. There was a key plate for a dead bolt, though if I understood right, it wouldn’t be locked because there was no one inside. The lower lock was a basic spring catch. It offered as much resistance as a building inspector did to palm grease. I clicked it shut behind me.
There were no lights on in the unit, which could confirm that Flora Nuñez had left during the day on Sunday or could mean nothing at all. I left it that way and switched on my flashlight. I got an impression of scuffed
linoleum and worn furnishings, lots of colors in the wall coverings and drapes. In the short inside hallway someone, presumably Flora Nuñez since she lived alone, had set up a small tabletop shrine, with a statuette of the Blessed Virgin, ringed with candles, prayer cards, and other religious trappings. I offered it a quick glance and moved on. Somewhere in the building, a water pipe coughed.
Barring total randomness, murder usually led you to the life of the victim: patterns of behavior, known associates, finances, love life, habits, affiliations, predilections, perversions, and possessions. What might Flora Nuñez’s have been?
I didn’t spend a lot of time on the obvious; it was unlikely there’d be anyplace the police hadn’t laid trail ahead of me. Still, I had to wonder: Because they were so sure they already had their man, was it possible they had overlooked something? In the kitchen there were several shelves in front of a window, holding potted herbs. I thought of Pepper’s idea of marrying the woman and taking her on the road. Would she cook big meals for him? The plants were beginning to wilt. Someone dies and other things die with her.
I opened cupboards, counter drawers, the refrigerator. I looked under the sink and in the wastebasket. There was a calendar tacked to the wall, Diego Rivera murals, and I paged forward and back, looking at the scarce notes she’d jotted there: a dentist appointment for early September, three days of last July inked in as vacation … nothing I needed to know. In the bathroom I checked the medicine cabinet and the linen closet. I even lifted the toilet tank cover—other people weren’t that imaginative, why should I be? The living room didn’t take long. I saved the bedroom for last.
I was hoping there’d be a hidden diary with entries up to the time she’d been killed and it would all be laid out in a neat hand—a dangerous liaison gone wrong—and you could stamp another case “solved” and add it to the Rasmussen files. There wasn’t. She kept a neat house: bed made, no clothes lying around. I found some CDs, a few back issues of Latina, some college textbooks on paralegal studies. In a bureau drawer, among neatly folded panties and nylons, I came across a Polaroid snapshot. I held it close to the light. Taken at a table in what appeared to be a nightclub, it showed a group of four women and two men. Two of the women were Flora Nuñez and Lucy Colon. A third looked vaguely familiar, though she was holding a drink up in a toast, so that part of her face was hidden. The other woman and the two men were strangers. To have a working photograph of Flora Nuñez, I slipped the Polaroid into my jacket pocket.
In the hallway the statue of the Virgin watched from its shrine. I examined it more closely than I had before. There was a strand of rosary beads wound around the base, along with several votives and a book of matches. The matches were from Viva!, a strip club out by the city limits, and I had a sudden recognition. I took out the Polaroid and tentatively identified the third woman as Danielle Frampton, who danced at the club, and whom I had helped out of a jam once. So? No bolt of lightning hit me. But a thought did.
I picked up the statuette, which was twelve inches high, made of ceramic, painted blue with a white shawl and headscarf and halo. I turned it over and saw a small hole in the base. I gave the figure a shake. Something made a papery movement inside.
I hesitated, then banged the statuette against the front edge of the altar and broke the head off. With my forefinger, I did a body cavity search and felt a curl of stiff paper, but I couldn’t get another finger in to tweeze it out. I banged the headless figure, and the torso shattered. I picked up the curled paper from among the shards and discovered that it was an index card. I straightened it out and held it to the flashlight. It was actually a ballot card, the kind they pass out to prospective jurors at the district courthouse. On the blank side, handwritten in ballpoint, was a list of letters and numbers.
None of it made any particular sense to me, though there was also a row of what looked to be dates: 4/18; 6/7; 7/14; 7/26; 8/26. Alongside several of them was the letter T. I looked at them a moment, feeling a sudden tingly paranoia. T for Troy?
For “Trouble,” I knew, if I got caught there. I put the juror card in my pocket. I picked up the bigger shards of broken statue with my handkerchief and dropped them into the kitchen trash bag. On an impulse I filled a glass from the sink tap and poured water on the potted herbs. I was at the door when I heard footsteps climbing the stairs.
One person? Two? I listened for voices but heard none. Then the steps started along the landing, coming toward the door. I slipped into the bedroom and got down and crawled under the bed. A key scratched at the lock. The door opened, and someone came into the apartment and shut the door. I heard footsteps move along the hall. My heart was drumming hard. Peering out past a dust ruffle, I looked for light but didn’t see any. Then I heard a sound that prickled the hairs on my nape: the soft crackle of a belt radio, with the gain turned low. Police?
I lay on my stomach in the dark, hoping that whoever was out there wasn’t responding to a report of someone seen entering the apartment. The person went down the hall to the kitchen. I heard more walking, and the belt radio again. The person retraced a route along the hallway and left. I waited until the descending tread of footsteps faded before I crawled out. From the living room, I peered past curtains and after a moment saw a man move along the street to a patrol car and get in behind the wheel. I saw him for only a moment, but I recognized him. Duross.
22
The carnival had a few safety lights burning here and there, but the overall effect was of a ghost encampment. I’d stayed in Flora Nuñez’s apartment just a few minutes longer, wondering what Officer Duross had been there for, giving the place a quick scan, but I didn’t see anything that struck me. When I knocked on the door of Pop Sonders’s motor home, he opened it a crack, saw me, and quickly waved me in.
“You see the watchers out there on the boulevard?”
I had seen several cars parked there, seen the glow of cigarettes in the dim interiors. “Who are they?”
“Citizens, near as I can tell. Keeping vigil. Somebody painted graffiti on Pepper’s trailer. Red Fogarty scrubbed it off this afternoon.”
“Maybe you should be over at the Venice.”
“Fat chance. I’m sticking here.”
I thought of Randy Nguyen in his lonely aerie.
“Have you got that schedule?” I asked, getting to why I had come.
From his desk drawer he produced a large accounting ledger. He opened it, and we sat down. “This here’s our itinerary for the year, date by date. What are you after?”
I looked for the days corresponding to those on the juror ballot card I’d found inside the statuette at Flora Nuñez’s apartment. On two of the days the show was en route to places; on one of the others they were set up outside Hartford, and on the final date there was no listing in the ledger.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Sonders asked.
“Could Pepper have slipped away from the carnival on these days and come up here?”
“To Lowell?” He frowned. “I don’t see how. He’d have to have requested it—or just walked off the job, and I don’t buy it.”
“But it’s possible?”
“I can’t say one hundred percent no, but damn close. You mind telling me what this all means?”
I told him, leaving out the part about illegally entering the woman’s apartment. “Beyond that,” I said, “I don’t know what it means. Maybe nothing.” I put the card away “Okay next question. Did you know that Pepper was busted another time?”
“Old news, Rasmussen. We’ve been there, remember? The cops know all about that.”
“I’m not talking about the broken school windows incident.”
His eyes deepened under the snowy ledge of brow.
“He did a month in the stockade at Camp Lejune for assaulting an officer—who happened to be a woman. You familiar with that?”
“Of course I am!” he blustered. But after a pause, he frowned. “No,” he said. “I wasn’t aware of that.”
At least someone w
as being honest with me. “The point is, it happened, and we didn’t know about it. The woman was a lieutenant who was riding him hard. They threw insubordination and verbal assault charges at him, but there were extenuating circumstances. The officer had a rep for hassles. In fact, she got a reprimand in a similar incident, so he was released with time served. I guess I can see reasons for him not to bring it up. A boyhood incident—that’s one thing, but maybe he figured two arrests would kill any chance of you hiring him.”
Pop Sonders’s face looked like a boiled potato. He puffed his lips and sank back in the chair, and for a while he kept silent. Finally he waved a hand in the direction of the boulevard. “We’re a reflection of them,” he said. “Those people out there in the cars. A reflection of what’s inside them. Most folks just want a good time, and that’s where we’re at. We’re happy to give it. But some people, not many, but some … they see ugliness. They want to win easy, no work involved. To some, we’re the traveling cheap thrills show. There’s people still come out to a carnival expecting bearded ladies and a guy who’ll bang nails into his head, or a hermaphrodite who’ll swing both ways. Get a life. We don’t bite the heads off chickens. But we’ve got a … a mystique, and it excites people in some way You can bet your boots and mittens on it. The mirrors—lot of truth in them mirrors. It’s all there. The venality the cheap thrills … a chance to look down on somebody else. And next day, we’re thankfully gone, no reminders, and you can all forget and get back to being who you were. Until next year, when those acids start to bubble up and they need to be released again.”
“You’re saying I’m with them?”